Welcome to Adam Kraus's random mixing of essays, commentary, and humor, all presented in a blog format. Hopefully you will find it interesting.

12.12.2004

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

People who know me know I'm not a big literary analysis type, and even less a poetry type. But I just started getting back into Billy Joel and, for the sake of promoting my own personal tastes, which let's face it is what a blog is for right, I want to share my excitement while engaging in a very crude and possibly incorrect lyrical analysis during the next few days.

I've always felt that if something needs to be said, then the most effective way to communicate it is in plain language. I'm still not big on indirect forms of communication, but some songs are just good. Now that I've been personally introduced to good singer-songwriter music through the music of my friend Dan and this new Billy Joel phase, I'm beginning to see that a good song is good because of the way it encapsulates a state of mind, and so almost comes to form its own little temporary world that the listener can enter into. This I feel is how the best vocal music comes about, across a wide range of genres, and it is notably missing in today's pop vocal music.

I've never given much creedence to interpretive or lyrical analysis and it's a skill I'd like to develop some more, this blog being the appropriate place to do it. So expect me to post some song lyrics and a few comments on why I think they're so good relatively soon.

On topic, there's a song lyric-style op-ed today by Maureen Dowd, so why don't I start with some commentating on that:

On the first day of Christmas,

my Rummy sent to me

a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree...

That's the beginning. There are ten more verses...you get the idea. Now this would be terribly cute if it weren't for that fact that - and maybe I'm wrong on this... it sucks. Oh well.